Anne Enright - The Green Road

Greg could not catch a breath. He pulled the air into him in tiny, shallow draughts, on and on, his body panicking until his mind snapped free and started to wander around the room — also around the thoughts that were in the room, and the memories that were hiding in the corners and under the bed. There was the occasional hallucination: a woman — who looked like his mother but was not his mother — sat in the chair sewing a long grey smock for him to wear when he was dead. Dr Torres, who might really be there, leaned over him and smiled. There was a panting cat draped across the top of his skull and he was terrified of its claws. This went on all night, until a tray startled him and he realised it was only supper time. The night was yet to come.

Two men died towards dawn: at least Greg was pretty sure that men died. He could hear praying in Spanish, then people weeping and helping each other away. In the morning, a man covered in Kaposi’s stood in his doorway and said, ‘I just need enough to do it. Don’t you think?’

The fever was less on this second day. Greg was able to swallow some Xanax, a big tub of which a tranny nurse called Celeste slapped down on his locker.

‘You want a cigarette, honey? You want some tea?’

All day, Greg drifted in and out of sleep, watching the sunlight cross the room, and the shadow following it. He smiled and thought about Billy and Dan, trying to imagine how they were together: he just couldn’t see it.

And this was strange, because no one else had any trouble seeing it. They were two beautiful young men up in the big city. One was pale and interesting, the other easy and tan, and Billy flung a friendly arm over Dan’s shoulder as they took the ferry over to Fire Island while, back in St Vincent’s, the Xanax kicked in.

It was a long, hot weekend.

On Monday morning, Greg woke to see Billy standing in his hospital room.

‘Hello.’

There are hours and days that change people, and they both had been changed. They were different people now. After a moment, Billy stepped up to kiss Greg briefly on the mouth. And this was such a nice gesture in that place of death, it was as though Greg’s fever had never happened and Fire Island was just a dream — though it was not a dream. Billy and Dan had taken several and various substances, they had danced till dawn: we all saw them, and we liked the way Dan kept his shirt on when everyone else stripped down; the two top buttons undone and his sternum gleaming in there, white as the inside of a seashell.

‘Where were you?’ said Greg.

‘I got a house-share in the Pines,’ said Billy. ‘Didn’t I say?’

‘Gold dust,’ said Greg.

‘I know.’

When Billy came back in to the hospital the next day, Greg was sitting on the edge of the bed, very weak but determined to go home. Billy had to find his pants, and push each leg up over Greg’s knees. Then he leaned in for an awkward hug, to lift him up off the bed and slip them up the rest of the way.

‘Oh God,’ said Greg.

‘That’s it,’ Billy said.

‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

‘Good luck with that bitch,’ said Billy. ‘Is this your shirt? Arm. Shush.’

Greg had started to moan. He moaned incontinently. He dribbled noise.

‘Hush, now.’

Billy got Greg’s shirt on and struggled with buttons and cuffs. He pulled his belt tight, attempted and abandoned the zipper, then he turned to sit beside Greg and for a moment they were both slumped on the edge of the bed.

‘Quiet down, will you? Come on.’

The legs he had just handled were the same legs Billy had once hauled up on either side of himself, while Greg’s dark and dreamy eyes looked up from the pillow. They were the same legs, except they were half the circumference. They were the same bones.

After he got Greg downstairs and into a cab and up the three flights to his walkup in the East Village, Billy didn’t have the energy to settle him in. He phoned Jessie and left a message on her answering service. Then he turned to Greg, who was collapsed in a chair with his coat still on.

‘I think it’s working,’ said Greg. ‘I can feel it lifting.’

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ said Billy, setting a hand on his back. Then he left.

Greg sat in the silence after the door had closed and realised it was true. His blood was singing; some weight was gone. So he did not care that Billy was off to see Irish Dan, that they would spend the night together, and the morning also. He did not mind that Dan would twist Billy’s love, somehow, and make him sad, because Greg had survived a course of amphotericin B, that bastard. He was still alive.

Dan did not shrink from Billy’s arm, thrown over his shoulder on the ferry, but he did not seem to want sex when they arrived at the Pines, or he did not want the sex to be good, or interesting or slow. And this was surprising because no one went to Fire Island just to walk along the beach. The only move Dan made, when they were finally in the house that Billy had organised, all tubular chairs and walnut floors, with its white linen curtains and Billy attractively arranged on the bed, was to unzip his fly. He did not let Billy near his ass, which was a pity, because Billy really wanted his ass. He turned away (which was fine) from Billy’s kiss. He might as well have folded his arms. For someone else, this would have been a challenge and a delight — a whole weekend to drag this Irish boy out of the closet, kicking and screaming with raw pleasure and afterthrob. But this was not Billy’s style. Billy wanted to talk to Dan. He wanted to put his tongue on the salt corner of Dan’s eye, where his eyelid trembled shut. He wanted to make him happy.

He also, personally, wanted to come. But Dan had no manners in that regard and, when Billy ended up doing the honours himself, he seemed to sneer a little, looking down at him from a height. Which was also fine. If sneering turned out to be Dan’s thing, there were plenty of guys who liked that too.

You could not say that Fire Island was entirely happy in the summer of 1991, but it was defiant, and happiness was there on the horizon, if you lifted your eyes to the sea. Dan did not seem to notice the sea. He watched the Friday night crowd at the Botel from behind a beer, followed by another beer, while Billy smiled and deflected offers of various kinds of fun.

Dan said, ‘They all look sort of identical.’

‘I know,’ said Billy. Though he was wearing the same short shorts and lace-up ankle boots as two hundred other men out on the dance floor.

Billy, meanwhile, was worried about the house-share, which was through a friend-of-a-friend with no mention of the cost. The beers were outrageously expensive and Dan drank steadily then looked for more. In the middle of his, maybe, third bottle, he turned to Billy and said, ‘Tell me. What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’

This was such a strange question, there in the middle of two hundred bare torsos, all holding the scent of the day’s lost sunshine, that Billy got a bit distracted and had to say it again: ‘What do I want ?’

Later, Dan relaxed a little in the darkness of their room. He did not complain about the double bed and allowed Billy to touch him down his back and legs. But he stayed curled over an undoubtedly steaming erection, and Billy woke early and so horny he had to slip out before Dan knew that he was gone.

‘Where were you?’ Dan was in the kitchen when Billy came back, he was opening and closing cupboard doors.

‘Just took a walk,’ said Billy, not mentioning the remnants of the night’s dancing he found wandering the dawn; a very pink blond boy who knelt in front of him, and a massive, tripping Blatino he leaned against, who jabbed a finger at his ass, and then got it right in.